Prison for former Swedbank chief over money-laundering scandal

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Former Swedbank chief executive Birgitte Bonnesen is facing 15 months in prison after a Swedish appeals court convicted her of spreading misleading information about the bank’s money laundering problems in Estonia. 

Bonnesen, who led Sweden’s oldest bank from 2016 until she was fired by its board in 2019, was convicted of “gross swindling” by the Svea Court of Appeal, making her the highest-ranking Swedish banker to go to jail over the scandal. 

She had previously been in charge of the bank’s Baltic business.

“The court has assessed several statements that the CEO has made to the press and equity analysts”, the court said in a statement on Tuesday.

“The court has con­cluded that two of the statements have been incorrect or mis­repre­sented facts in a way that they have been misleading in the sense of the Swedish Criminal Code.”

Bonnesen intended to appeal against the verdict, her lawyer, Per Samuelsson, told TT, a Swedish news agency. She was acquitted of other charges brought against her. 

The conviction relates to one of Europe’s biggest money-laundering scandals. Both Swedbank and Denmark’s Danske Bank were alleged to have been part of a system that allowed Russian oligarchs and criminals to move money through their Baltic branches and into the western financial system. 

The Swedish court said on Tuesday that Bonnesen “disseminated misleading statements” in newspaper and TV interviews in relation to the bank’s third-quarter results in 2018.

“The state­ments conveyed the misleading message that there did not exist any suspicious money laundering links to the operations in Estonia of another bank,” the court said.

“The misleading infor­mation was liable to influence the assessment of the Swedish bank from a financial point of view, and thereby cause a loss.”

Sweden’s economic crime authority charged Bonnesen with fraud and market manipulation in January 2022.

Swedbank commissioned a report into the matter by law firm Clifford Chance, which found that the bank had carried out €37bn of transactions with a high risk for money laundering between 2014 and 2019.

An internal Swedbank report, seen by public broadcaster SVT, found about €80bn of money flowed through the non-resident client business of the bank in the Baltics from 2008 until 2013, most of it from Russia and other ex-Soviet states.

Swedbank cancelled Bonnesen’s severance pay in March 2020 following the publication of the Clifford Chance report. The document judged that statements Bonnesen made in late 2018 and early 2019, as the scandal was developing, were “inaccurate or presented without sufficient context”.

However, the bank decided not to pursue any legal case of its own against Bonnesen or her predecessor Michael Wolf, who was in charge from 2009 until 2016.